I posted some chapters from this in the Dropbox!

In an excerpt The Uses of the University Clark Kerr develops a model of the evolution of the modern university that is strongly reminiscent of the geocentric astronomical models that dominated the embryonic centers for higher learning of medieval times.

Culture, what is culture for the author? If culture and intellect began with the ancient Greeks, where did they get it from? Perhaps they reached beyond the quotidian to the lofty ether and snatched the knowledge of the gods. Indeed, the West tells just such a story. Conflating formalization and compartmentalization with creation. Indeed, what’s striking in the multiversity is how multifaceted knowledge production has become and is expected to be.

The high medieval guild like structure of academia persists, despite the liberality of professors. That they would advocate for socialist causes in society at large but fiercely defend the hierarchical and antiquated structure of academia is odd. But it’s also indicative of the many contradictions the modern university must address and even serve simultaneously. While some advocate learning for its own sake, most people have to earn a living. More and more said living is earned by selling ones creative and intellectual ability to engage with an elaborate counting machine; as opposed to one’s physical capacity to interact with a fabricating machine.

The dysfunctional marriage of industry and education has produced many bastards: the proprietary college; on-site corporate facilities and test-preparation business that send tremors through a playing field touted as level, etc. Even have a century ago, Kerr recognized the expanding and contradictory roles the university is asked to play, especially in the United States. The undergraduate student is pushed through a liberal arts/elective curriculum that leads to sophistry and solipsism. The graduate student is atomized in a field of research that by the necessity to be original necessarily means it will be esoteric. This isolated student must then either become a researcher/scholar/educator and/or engage in the fully American twist: service to society. After ten plus years of abstraction the transition to reality must be jarring.  Kerr also highlighted and scarily predicted the role that the university itself would play in vetting prospective sources of labor power for capital. Being hired then trained to do a job is nearly unheard of in the twenty-first century. The expectation is that the BA, will also assure competent training in which ever industry plucks the ripening fruit. Theory, research practice, and job skills must somehow be crushed together in four years. With the quasi-medieval hierarchy in place, students are not a significant part of negotiating the curriculum, but looking to create the best worlds to populate the multiverse, academia looks more and more to industry. 

The gears of old customs and new expectations have found stasis. What the new traveler doesn’t know is that there is no air around or between the turning gyres that cannot stop lest the delicate balance be upset.

The prima facie burden of any organization is to reproduce itself. If indeed we are reproducing this ancient ethos and casuistry through modern means. If at the core and origin of knowledge itself (Kerr asserts) is the hierarchical, belligerent, misogynistic, slave-based culture of the ancient Greeks, then what are the prospects of higher learning as a liberatory tool?

Chapter 1 presents what I would consider a very detailed account of the series of events which led to the establishment of public higher education in New York City.  This is a great example of a play-by-play of social change in which a critical mass of minority groups begin mobilizing, with the support of some white groups. In addition, the leadership of the time was either forced through the political process (upcoming elections) or genuinely committed to making this type of change. There were several turning points with one being the joining of the majority white groups to the dialogue around access to higher education for all through the leadership of the labor unions and a second, much later, being a fire on campus which seemed to have precipitated a final decision on the matter after weeks of conflict; almost as a metaphor for what things were coming down to. I’m sure others may identify other moments as signifiant turning points but these are ones that stood out to me.  After it was all said and done I was left wonder- where did the money to finance public higher education come from ultimately? were other social programs cut?

It was particularly interesting to read about the divisions amongst the student body at the time based on which area of study they were part of – social sciences vs hard sciences. I think it is sometimes easy to forget that in these times of student activism there were students who actually opposed what I may view as the “right thing to do” and that these are likely individuals who now hold leadership positions themselves. From the perspective of a student of history- I wonder what types of attempts there may have been to engage those groups of students (“engineers”) in dialogue around the benefits of public higher education. This seems to be a challenge we as a society still struggle with today. Another level of division that was apparent was the one between Jewish people and Black/ Puerto Rican groups- would this time period be considered within the historical process by which Jewish people transitioned into whiteness? This reminded me of the dynamic around admissions testing for high schools in NY, which became particularly visible over the past year with the seemingly adversarial position between Asian families and black and brown communities.

Lastly, the idea that once open access was established the vision was for the university to be held responsible for student success as much as the student through various mechanisms of support for incoming students and focused on retention. I wonder if this concept attached consequences to the university similar to the current trend to cut funding to “underperforming” schools as I don’t imagine negative outcomes in student retention would instead result in more funding for more support services to better meet student needs.

As articulated in Fabricant and Brier’s Austerity Blues, the post-World War II climate initiated many new considerations as to the democratic function of higher education and its formative potential in citizen building. The Zook Commission (1946) detailed initiatives and protocols to engage college-level learning in the representative fight for democracy, including calls for racial justice in both admissions processes and institutional culture. Despite the lingering stench of fascism amidst the western world, reports from the commission remain quite compelling, particularly with respect to the inclusion of certain undergirding principles of socialism as well as pre-Brown vs. Board of Education positions on the wholistic dangers and disadvantages of racially segregated education.

Though not explicitly mentioned by Fabricant and Brier, George Zook and his presidential commission he lead follow previous efforts to articulate citizenship-building within higher education, namely those articulated by the National Society for the Study of Education and their Thirty-Eighth Yearbook (1939). The document in question endeavors to cultivate a general education, largely centered around the humanities, with the explicit stipulation that all studies under this newly proposed umbrella field be deliberated integrated, so as to inform well-rounded students and active citizens. Why I bring this up and perhaps find the timing quite interesting is because just half a decade prior to the Zook-led commission emerges the beginnings of first-year writing programs as part of a common core of courses necessary to mold engaged Americans who will readily participate in all facets of the democratic system.

Moreover, the resonate use of the word integration, in all its social, cultural, and curricular implications, is considerably more interesting within the context of how segregating schooling remained for subsequent decades and how despite the progressivism of the Zook   Commission, actual representation within higher education from students, faculty, and course content are still so systematically controlled. And though this is no revelation, I remain struck by the repeat omissions of formal, institutional efforts to address racial and gender inequality with respect to the deeply white, European epistemologies that define the very foundations of higher learning.

*Apologies for the absence of any definite argument here, as I still have so many more thoughts and musings that I hope to discuss with you all in class!

Hi all- I apologize for the delay in my post- this selection however was an eerie reminder of how many aspects of higher education have not changed much at all; back to our shuffle metaphor- perhaps only some of the order of the songs have changed but the album is still the same. These chapters focused on the history around Jewish communities in NYC and higher education- including themes which very relevant today.

It took me a minute to recalibrate my reading of “Progressive” in this text  in  contrast to how this label is currently being used.  How does this shifting of the meaning behind the language we use impact our ability to form solidarity across generations?  In understanding “progressives” as representing the business classes the foundation of what we see today in systems of education (as well as other systems) is clear with the following trends and values: centralization, efficiency, americanization, appointed locus of control, professionalism, superiority in exclusivity, anti-socialism, anti-immigrant and “democratization” through greater individual freedom. How are these hallmarks of capitalist white supremacy still seen in our liberal or even “progressive” (by today’s terms) higher education institutions and who benefits from these?

In reading about some of the ways the labor class engaged in resistance, I wondered what did the organizing look like by Jewish folks as they pushed to ensure access to the emerging systems of higher education, while at times recognizing this dehumanizing system was meant to use them as part of the “Americanization” machine. In the examples given of how reform was contextualized under the need to prepare new generations of young men to join the “toil” in the labor sector [in favor of capitalism] it is clear profit and maintaining the status of quo of wealth disparity is never forgotten.  The creating of the Free Academy reminded me of how groups at times take more moderate positions or use language or logic which appeals to the dominant groups.  Ultimately, the middle class ended up benefitting from gains in public education and more rungs on the economic ladder, rather than working class children whose parents likely engaged in the work of making these openings possible.  How much does a social movement’s ideology tolerate it being water downed before it is co-opted in the process of being accepted by the power-wielders? Almost tragically, despite the elite still sending their children to places like Columbia and Harvard- public education was nonetheless created in the image of class hierarchies as a model of liberal democracy.

In a similar line of thought, what lessons can “more palatable” communities of color learn from white Jewish teachers who knowingly or unknowingly were used as a mechanism of anglo- Americanization even when  the school system was anti-semitic and hostile towards Jewish culture- teaching a curriculum which deemed immigrants as a social problem? Their story includes reminders of the power in numbers- where even though a numerical minority, Jewish educators were able to hold on to their radicalism despite social forces against this. How has the process of Jewish people becoming white become another layer for us to address in bridging common causes for justice?

The larger political context for this political unrest is linked to a peak in immigrant population and the mechanization of labor- how is the political and social climate of today similar or different to that which CCNY experienced as a pre-cursor to institutional reform within higher education? What might be the differences between the veiled reification of settler capitalism under the guise of reform of the 1900s and more meaningful transformational change which moves towards a redistribution of power that our generation must consider? Who are the players of today’s conversations and who stands to benefit from no change?

As the college forged its way across the United States following the same strident steps of the pioneer settlers before, public investment in them was gained. Though contested, through efforts of extension courses and other outreach to communities the public funding of public universities finally became part of the status quo, and even summarily expanded by the turn of the twentieth century. The culture of the university and the regional cultures that inform them varied across this massive nation.  A feature in all regions is the dialectic of the self and the collective that plays out on different scales and is practiced in different realms depending on the era and zeitgeist.

The purpose of the college has been to produce young people (read men) capable of taking over at the helm of their forefathers to guides the nation to her future majesty. Where as the odd, quasi-public monstrosity of Cornell in its early days, tried to find a balance between the trade school and training “captains in the army of industry.” A nation eager to develop and cultivate its vast area was surely in need of agronomy and applied science to fuel to its burgeoning industry, but despite that the opportunity to transmit notions of class superiority and fitness could not be missed.

The tension between classical subjects and practical/vocational education: while arguably a more foundational issue in the agrarian Mid-West, was not uniformly settled and instead formed a second part of the identity crisis faced by American higher education.  Where they transmit culture as the English or producing scholarship as the Germans?  The cultural tropes that were part of college preparatory courses were transferred squarely to the high schools. In doing so, graduating high school slowly became the means of accessing a college education. Rather than liberating the student from the drudgery of “irrelevant” classical studies, it instead ensured that only those who could afford to go through high school instead of working were admitted to college. The prepared self won against the collective access granted by having college prep happen within the college.

The agreement of the early twentieth Progressive movement was the higher education should be focused on neither culture or scholarship. Rather it focused on producing citizens dedicated to progress and democracy as the panacea to all societal ills. The protestant marriage of “material and moral achievement” produced Service to individualize responsibility for the problems that plague industrial society. Labor unions and socialism demanded a collectivism that is anathema to the American myth of self-reliance, and sure to bring “disillusionment and despair.” Service was to ameliorate the symptoms urbanization and industrialization brought to those who were not inoculated by wealth.

It seems that the crafting of the middle-class individual is a central duty of the American university from its inception. The public sites, especially, can appeal to the aspirant who might otherwise be drawn to the radical underbelly of the Progressive era. If the university is to make citizens in the image that is needed for the time, as the example of service during the Progressive era demonstrates, are moments of seeming “progress” at universities truly that or merely an institutional effort to provide an outlet as to produce the equilibrium that society needs to perpetuate the status quo?

Tracing the role of Columbia’s “““guiding””” hand in New York (City and State) educational policies (read: politics), Wechsler identifies college admissions processes as the teetering fulcrum point of tensions between an institution’s apparent “““right””” to self-definition and its role in shaping “the larger society” in and by which it operates (187). Wechsler’s primary method relies on an ostensibly neutral historical voice that tells two stories at once: the external story, which escapes Columbia’s grasp here even despite the university’s jealous micromanagement of it, and the internal story, which betrays the institution’s true power-seeking and -maintaining objectives.

Absent largely from his account (not unlike some of the others we’ve examined) are student voices—save for that of Columbia’s student newspaper, which explicitly “endorsed […] legislation” (199) prohibiting discrimination in college admissions. By keeping the student newspaper relegated to the margins, Wechsler redoubles Columbia’s blind ignorance of student interests (((broadly writ to include not just Columbia’s students but also those whom Columbia refused to admit))). Wechsler’s performance results in a picture not of education and learning but of politics—and of power. The university (its changing form, its cultural significance, its concern for its own murky ends—but not, carefully, the “““content””” of its academic contributions) is merely a fragile pretext for the “““old guard””” to exercise its favorite classist function: maintaining its iron claim to cultural-political (re)production.

Wechsler’s genealogical (archival) technique prevents him from making explicit the important circular point his intimations seem only to trace lightly. I’ll try to be a bit blunter in this paragraph’s speculative paraphrase. The most selective schools’ admissions offices, Wechsler argues, determine at least in part “the nature of the decisions made by those in [state] authority” (187). Problems arise, obviously, when these institutions’ alumni and friends assume power, whether by democratic election or (perhaps more frequently) by political appointment. Whom, then, do these figures serve—or (if it’s any different) whom do they end up serving: the credentialing entity that “““legitimates””” their claim to power? or the people who invest their trust in the governmental institutions designed to shepherd the public’s common good (cf. “commonwealth”). The gate-keepers admit only those who will one day faithfully assume the gate-keeping function, it seems, and the cultural interests these gate-kept institutions claim to produce are sustained by the culture through which they act—and that acts through them.

I’m being deliberately circular because Wechsler wisely suggests college admissions and the “standards” discussion are similarly obfuscatory, spiralized. (((The end of this reflection will contend admissions today are no less opaque and inaccessible.))) Wechsler’s point of departure (admissions as institutional identity practice) is purposeful, even if it feels disjointed or irrelevant to the chronicle it introduces, because it illuminates his ending condemnation of Nicholas Murray Butler, Columbia’s president during Wechsler’s period of examination. Though Butler’s refusal (206) to “distin[guish] between public and private sponsorship of higher education” because he “claim[ed] that all universities were public in the sense that they […] served a public function” may be admirable (one to which I—and perhaps Reagan*—and most anyone who argues for student loan forgiveness—am sympathetic), it also kind of misses the point (this is me reading Wechsler with a liberal degree of speculation): it’s not that we should let everyone in, nor is it that we need to lower our standards. Rather: it’s that inequities (or? injustices) will persist so long as admissions practices aren’t viewed as an institution’s primary mechanism for self-definition. (((Cf. BPRSC’s Five Demands, which originate from the thesis that the “standards” discussion is a plainly racist attempt to exclude exactly those students whom CUNY must serve most—those who, as Wechsler himself puts it, comprise CCNY’s “local constituency” (191). [—Query who is among CUNY’s non-local constituencies, and/or whether she has any at all?])))

Wechsler’s circles tighten their focus around this suggestion just before this chapter’s ending (gentle) indictment of Butler, which I’ve just mentioned. The final recommendations of the Temporary Commission on the Need for a State University (the business and politics of which concern much of this chapter) limited state funds “only to institutions that admitted students on the basis of merit and not with regard to race, color, creed, or national origin” (203). For obvious reasons, this is a rather tenable endorsement—and (as Wechsler’s concluding meditation on Butler seem to note) one that even the Commission’s opponents seemed to accept eventually. But it gets a bit more complicated when we trouble “merit”—and more so when skeptics demand definitions of “merit” from admissions boards that (!speculation!) step out from their desk hiding spots (!provocation!) to condescend: “agenc[ies] responsible for determining violations” must “understand all the complexities of admissions policies” (202). [Translation (read: indulgent provocation): You, the public, can’t ever understand our process because you don’t meet our “standards,” you weren’t accepted into it, your privilege didn’t filter through it, and your power doesn’t exist without proximity to the thought that happens by and emanates from it. (!!!)]

How opaque is this convenient shield of “complexities”—just as useless as—if not more so than—“merit” equations! We’re still wrestling with these terms and the inequities they (in)elegantly conceal. Emerson writes in “American Scholar” of the “joy” that “awe[s]” us when we find in some long-dead poet’s work “that which [we] also ha[ve] well-nigh thought and said.” Yet it’s not “joy” that overtakes me when I realize—most recently: earlier this week at about the halfway point of a Chronicle article on SFFA v. Harvard’s latest developments**—that we’ve been having this debate since long ((at least) a half-century!) before Kennedy deployed the term “affirmative action.” This chapter sobered me by sparking something more akin to horror than to the “joy” Emerson profiled, coincidentally (or not), before (!gate-keeping!) Harvard’s (!!!ultra gate-keeping!!!) Phi Beta Kappa chapter in 1837: we’ve already had this conversation on “complexities” and “merit”—and we keep having it, no matter the language we use to describe it. To be sure, we have made some great progressive steps. But I wonder: why haven’t we been able to arrive at an argument good enough to best those from even the most “““selective””” gatekeepers? even the stingiest lawmakers? even the most skeptical “constituent”?

Thanks for thinking with me; I hope you’ve been provoked.

* I’m invoking here all the different potential valences of a curious little paragraph I read a few weeks ago that keep returning to my mind—from a recent (2018) Feminist Studies article on our apparent “Crisis Consensus” by Abigail Boggs and Nick Mitchell smack in the middle of 461. [@Flora will recognize this piece from Jessica’s class(!).]

**This is the Chronicle article and this is the Harvard Crimson piece.

https://www.chronicle.com/article/Academes-Outcast-Prophet/233966

In the Introduction, Chapter 3 and 4, Thelin provides a historical review and analysis of the factors which shaped higher education between 1860 and 1910. He notes that his sources go beyond more superficial comparisons of financial date and include financial data which is adjusted for inflation and demographic changes, as well as looking at documents and secondary sources to trace the stories behind the numbers.

Although Thelin makes mention of the similarities and differences in the development of higher education for all white and black communities and the way white supremacy shaped the structure, funding sources and status of schools, I was curious as to the relative minimal direct reference to the displacement and genocide of indigenous people by the US government in the historical analysis of the Morrill Act, although it was made clear the question of western colonization was central to this legislation. In this regard, I believe one continuing important point of inquiry for higher education today is that of what is owed to the the original peoples on whose land places of higher learning were built; and the relationship between this history and the way universities continue to replicate a pattern of displacement of disempowered communities today? What is the role of students, faculty and administrators in both acknowledging and reconciling this tension given increasingly mainstream discourses of social justice and accountability across intersectionality?

Throughout the two chapters, some of the values foundational to neoliberalism within higher education appear to be woven into the construction of higher education, in both literal and ideological ways: for example, the ways higher education was initially meant to be for white males of higher social status- with this being an expanding category albeit permanently exclusive; the establishment of  Eurocentric “scientific knowledge” as the dominant worldview in research, pedagogy and knowledge production;  the establishment of hierarchies of fields, schools, personnel and generations of faculty; the increased role of business in the leadership of higher education; the professionalization of faculty and students;  etc. Other influences mentioned in analyzing the ideologies shaping higher education include the role of dominant religious institutions, militarism, competitiveness and individualism, values of meritocracy and a reliance on the “Protestant ethic” to guide affluent people to fund the deserving fund requests.  From a more progressive perspective, these values and ideologies are understood to have functioned as barriers to equitable access to education and job opportunities for women, people of color, immigrants, people in poverty and other marginalized groups. However, there are also ways that the space of higher education seems to have created opportunities for community building and openings for these groups to carve pathways into upward mobility and success. How does this contrast in the social costs and benefits to historically disempowered people continue to be reflected in today’s world of higher education? How has it changed?

On first pass, Laurence Veysey’s Emergence of the American University feels very reminiscent, almost nostalgic.  Reformations in higher education today echo earlier issues of curriculum, access, rigor, administration versus faculty versus students.  First published in 1965, it looks back at post-secondary’s first refiguring, after the first Morrill act, and the way universities approached broadening access beyond the clergy to the professions and merchant classes. And I do want to talk some about the irony then and now, of America’s dislike of a learned class, wealthy elites diminishing the power of education while sending their sons through the system, there is something else that is profoundly provoking me to the point of distraction.

About halfway through the book, page 271, Veysey  addresses diversity on college campus after the 1890.  In retrospect he says, “the undergraduate population of the turn of the century seems remarkably homogeneous: a parade of Anglo-Saxon names and pale, freshly scrubbed faces.”  He goes to qualify this statement by pointing out that in fifty years, there was indeed a “new and democratic” diversity on campus, Catholic, Jews and a few “Negroes.” And one might be forgiven if one assumes that this is entirely male since most of what Veysey’s discusses in his text thus far is male-centric.  But no, turning the page, we discover, very briefly in one sentence, that forty-percent of the undergraduate population is female. 40%.  Forty percent.  Wow.  I am interested.

And disappointed. Because this is nearly the sum total of the attention Veysey devotes to forty-percent of students on campus.   He drops a mirage of a mention later when he again recounts the various personas on campus: “Rivalry, diversity, and incongruity paraded themselves at every level.  Boys who still played with marbles, men who hid in libraries, and worldly executives all belonged to the same academic organization.  The laboratory, the football stadium, and the dignified presidential suite each claimed a certain legitimacy as the center of activities.  The chaplain, the co-ed tacitly seeking a husband, the professor of agriculture.… ”(Veysey 332).  I am quoting this lengthy treatment because I get a pretty good picture of the men on campus, who they are, what they are concerned with.  But apparently forty-percent of the campus is solely there to prospect for marriage partners.  Really?  Feels dismissive.  So at this point, I am flipping the book over and thumbing the index.  Diversity must mean something entirely different today than it did in 1965.  Gender seems significant enough of topic to discuss in light of the reforms that have rocked universities since their inception.  But Veysey devotes maybe 50 words total to women scholars, ten mentions and even that number’s misleading.  He dismisses the “sexual revolution” in a pat sentence.  Nothing to see here folks, move along. He counted “sex” and “sexual” as mentions of “co-education.”  But women in classrooms or as faculty or when they were first admitted.  Nope.  Nothing.  Not important.

Next index search: students of color.  Six mentions. Here’s my favorite:  “Harvard’s idea is diversity.”  Then Veysey spends two sentences on Harvard’s enrollment of Blacks.  Page 288 if you are reading along.  Who were these rare students?  That’s not what we are going to discuss.  What was worthy of mentioning?  Southerners avoiding Harvard and that Yale would never admit students of color.  But not much more on who these students were or how they impacted high education.  Maybe they didn’t.  Who knows? Not Veysey’s readers.

I get it, its 1965 writing about 1900.  I find it interesting that diversity is thoroughly explored in regards to higher education on white social-economic social mobility, but not much beyond. Veysey discusses diversity by not addressing diversity.  I’ll like to talk through this misfire because it’s slowing me down from discussing or reflecting on the rest of the book.  And there’s some truly fascinating unpacking to be had here.